Cooling solutions Hello folks, I have a 2.8 p4 northwood clocked up to 3.2. If I use a near-stock heatsink e.g.cast aluminum, somewhat small, would you expect my processor to live a long, full life. Or will it burn up in three weeks? I don't want to go overboard on a heatsink and I don't want my proc. to die. Any thoughts or suggestions? Thanks!

A good motherboard with an AGP 8X slot, if you can find one. The board should be ATX rather than micro atx, the full size boards are usually better running. It should take 4gb of ddr, hopefully pc3200.
Add a Northwood CPU, a fast one. A good socket 478 cooler.
DDR3200, this is fairly cheap on Ebay new. A good AGP card, maybe a geforce 3 or 4. A large IDE hard disk. ribbon cables. Maybe a floppy drive. DVD RW DRIVE. P4 PSU....350 WATSS AT LEAST.


LATER P4 478 CHIPS HAD 1MB CACHE RATHER THAN THE NORTHWOOD'S 512K CACHE BUT THEY RAN HOT AND NEEDED VERY GOOD COOLING GENERALLY, THEY ARE BEST AVOIDED IN MY OPINION.

I have a Compaq that came with this board and a celeron 1.8 or 2.0 I believe. The fastest P4 that will run is a Intel Northwood 2.8 Ghtz 400 FSB nothing ELSE! Northwood 2.8 is the fastest 400 FSB, the boards chipset won't run anything faster than 400 FSB. Mine is running, Win 7 the Northwood P4 2.8 with 2 gigs ram, 160 gig HD and a 256 video card for over 5 years (minus win 7, had XP before with no issues. Good for light gaming, web surfing and MS office! Add a Zotac 512 MB PCI or Sparkle Video card and you can handle most more medium gaiming out today!

Exact replacement
http://cgi.ebay.com/Pentium-4-2-53GHz-512KB-533MHz-SL6S2-478-pin-Northwood-/220676402673?pt=CPUs&hash=item336156adf1
Upgrade
http://cgi.ebay.com/Pentium-4-IV-P4-CPU-3-2Ghz-3-2-512k-800-Northwood-478-/370436974978?pt=CPUs&hash=item563fc3a982

repalce ram

Specifications
CPU
• Supports Intel® P4 Northwood/Prescott/P4 Extreme Edition processors.(PCB v1.1 only)
• FSB 400(Northwood only)/533/800MHz
• Supports up 3.2GHz and higher speed
Memory Speed/CPU FSB Support Matrix
Memory Speed/CPU FSB Support Matrix

FSB\Memory clock DDR266 DDR333 DDR400 800 MHz YES YES* YES 533 MHz YES YES NO 400 MHz YES NO NO
• Intel® 865G Chipset
- Supports 800/533/400MHz Intel NetBurst micro-architecture bus.
- Integrated graphic controller.
- Supports PC2100/PC2700 /PC3200 memory.
- Supports AGP 8X/4X at 0.8V (AGP 3.0) or 4X at 1.5V (not support 3.3V) interface.
• Intel® ICH5 Chipset
- AC'97 2.3 interface
- 8 USB 2.0/1.1 ports
- 2 channel Ultra ATA/100 Bus Master IDE controller
- SMBus 2.0 support
- 2 serial ATA Host Controllers
- Integrated LAN controller
• Support 100(Northwood only)/133/200MHz
• Support 400(Northwood only)/533/800MHz Intel NetBurst micro-architecture bus.
• Supports two 64-bit wide DDR data channels.
• Available bandwidth up to 3.2GB/s(DDR 400) for single-channel
mode and 6.4GB/s(DDR 400) for dual-channel mode.
• Supports four unbuffered DIMM of 2.5 Volt DDR SDRAM.
• Supports up to 4GB memory size without ECC.
• One AGP slot supports 8x/4x at 0.8V (AGP 3.0) or 4x at 1.5V (3.3V is not supported).
• Three PCI 2.2 32-bit Master PCI Bus slots.
- Supports 3.3v/5v PCI bus Interface.
• One CNR slot
• Dual Ultra DMA 66/100 IDE controllers integrated in ICH5
- Supports PIO, Bus Master operation modes.
- Can connect up to four Ultra ATA drives.
• Serial ATA/150 controller integrated in ICH5
- Up to 150MB/sec transfer speeds.
- Can connect up to two Serial ATA drives.
• AC'97 link controller integrated in ICH5
• 6 channels software audio codec C-Media 9739A
- Compliance with AC97 v2.2 Spec.
- Meet PC2001 audio performance requirement.
- Can support SPDIF Out via 3-pin SPDIF bracket only.
• Intel 82562EZ
- Integrated 10/100 Ethernet MAC and PHY in one chip
- Supports 10Mb/s and 100Mb/s auto-negotiation operation
- Compliant with PCI v2.2, and LAN on Motherboard (LOM) standard

That's not an honest question; are you somehow going to use both the new heatsink and the old one together, so they have to be compatible?  Since you're not, I suggest looking for heatsinks compatible with P4 on a shopping or trade site, which totally have you covered.  There's nothing to fix here.

That system is a little old though.  For your electricity dollar and your time, you will get more use out of a nice 6-core CPU, DDR3, etc.  Bon chance.

The MSI 865PE Neo2-PLS
Supports Intel® P4 Northwood/Prescott (Socket 478) processors.
FSB 400 (for Northwood only), 533, 800MHz.
Supports up to 3.2GHz or higher speed.
See page 1-2 in your manual. Also see page 2-3.
MSI supported CPU list; http://www.msi.com/index.php?func=prodcpusupport&maincat_no=1&prod_no=569#menu
Main link for 865PE Neo2 platform; http://www.msi.com/index.php?func=searchresult&keywords=865PE+Neo2

Cheers'
Mike

This is a standard micro atx board. The holes you are seeing will be on any 478 mobo, you just have to remove the black bracket, which is usually achieved by lifting the center pin in each of the corners.

Roberto,
Well I can say its a socket 478 P4 and you can probably only upgrade to about a 2.4Ghz P4 , probably not much of an upgrade, better to build or buy a new PC for around $500-$600
Eric

I’m happy to help further over the phone at https://www.6ya.com/expert/eric_ab7c09ec01841771

see this official cpu support for your board, you can go upto a 2.8ghz northwood P4 cpu http://global.msi.com.tw/index.php?func=prodcpusupport&prod_no=299&maincat_no=1#menu